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Intra-Party Judicial Decision-Making and Conflict Resolution: A Political Approach
Nicole Bolleyer, Felix-Christopher von Nostitz and Nils-Christian Bormann (all University of
Exeter)
Paper prepared for the Worksop “Rethinking Intra-Party Cohesion in Time of Party
Transformation” for the ECPR Joint Session, April 25-30, 2017, Nottingham, UK
First Draft, Comments Welcome
Abstract: An examination of intra-party tribunals can offer major insights into how parties manage conflict, which is important to assure intra-party cohesion. Party tribunals can decide to rule in favour or against those initiating cases. More fundamentally, they can refuse to deal with cases altogether. Consequently, the question emerges whether these decisions are political driven or made on ‘neutral’ grounds. To address this question, we offer a political account of whether and why party tribunals accept or refuse to handle cases, starting from three party goals of policy, office and votes (Müller and Strøm, 1999). We test our hypotheses using a unique data set covering 1088 tribunal decisions in six German parties since the introduction of compulsory party tribunals in the 1967 Party Law. We use a mixed-effects probit model to estimate the likelihood of case acceptance. Our analysis finds that political factors related to office, policy and vote aspirations indeed affect decision-making at the acceptance stage of intra-party tribunals. With regard to policy, judges in ideologically united parties dismiss cases more easily than their counterparts in more divided parties. Concerning office, judges are more likely to accept a case after their party has lost government, as a move to the opposition weakens the ability of a party to downplay conflict. Despite examining this question in a country where a highly constraining party law tries to assure the independence of party tribunals through detailed provisions, political drivers are important, thus our findings raise questions as to what extent it is possible to effectively transplant court structures into an organisational setting.
Keywords: Conflict, Conflict Resolution, Elites, Party Members, Political Parties
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Introduction
The ability of parties to manage and ultimately resolve intra-party conflict is not only vital for
its organisational survival but also to achieve its functions within the political system. To do
so, parties just as other complex organizations adopt different kinds of conflict regulation
mechanisms (Rahim 2011; Smith and Gauja 2010; Bolleyer et al 2016). Here we focus on
intra-party tribunals, quasi-judicial bodies established within party organisations to resolve
internal disputes that aim to correspond to court structures within democratic states. In
order to function effectively, they are supposed be neutral, independent and fair. Indeed
parties often claim to emulate these norms in their conflict resolution procedures, especially
if strongly attached to democratic norms, yet as Rahat points out “…these organs are
suspected (often with reason) of being partial." (2013: 141). In addition, even in much more
regulated state settings, questions arise whether these standards are always maintained by
courts: for instance, the legal literature on judicial decision-making highlights the leeway of
judges to decide which "cases are worthy of their time and attention“ (Yates and Coggins:
286) and that judges’ partisan and policy preferences play a role in accepting cases (Zorn and
Bowie 2010).
While the role of political factors has been identified when courts decide cases, far
less attention has been paid to the acceptance stage (Hein and Ewert 2016). However,
exclusively considering the decision stage is problematic: it might make us overlook how
political pressures lead conflict to be bypassed and ignored, as judges refuse to deal with
cases ‘on formal grounds', and how possible political influences at an earlier stage of the
judicial process impact on its later stages. This is especially crucial if the decision stage itself
shows little sign of politicisation. If this is an issue in the operation of state courts, the
question emerges if we can observe similar influences of non–legal factors in the acceptance
stage of intra-party tribunals. Therefore this paper focuses on whether and how political or
strategic considerations linked to parties’ attempt to achieve the three core goals of vote
maximization, office holding and policy making (Müller and Strøm 1999) affect tribunal
judges' decision to take on a case or reject it, a decision that officially is justified on formal
grounds (the ‘acceptance stage'). In short, the central research question of this paper is
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whether intra-party tribunal decisions at the acceptance stage are politicised and if so what
party goals are influential in this process.
The paper explores this question for the German party tribunals operating within the strict
legal restrictions of the German Party Law of 1967, outlining in detail the set-up and
operation of independent and neutral party tribunals. It requires parties to have party
tribunal statutes that guarantee all participants the right to a court hearing, the right to a fair
process, and the replacement of judges in cases of bias (§14 Abs 4). Further, the Party Law
prohibits judges from having any leadership role in the party, to be employed by it or receive
a salary from the party in any form (§14 Abs 2). While judges can and do reject cases based
on formal error(s) or lack or merit, plaintiffs have the right to appeal this rejection leading to
a hearing of their case. This legal and organisational set-up makes Germany the least likely
case to find politicised judicial decision-making in an intra–party setting and therefore
constitutes a ‘hard case‘ to test or framework. If we find politicised judicial decision-making
here it is highly likely to play an even stronger role in less regulated intra-party dispute
mechanisms and thus challenges the existence intra-party democracies. This further points
to the challenge to effectively transplant court structures into any organisational setting.
The paper is theoretically innovative as it develops a new rationale based on party
goals to study the impact of political factors on intra-party conflict resolution. While
previous literature considered the impact of these goals in for example the study of coalition
formation and other aspects of party behaviour (see Pedersen 2012) they are rarely used to
study intra-party decision-making and even less so in the context of conflict resolution.
In empirical terms, the scenarios of intra-party dispute that are most intensively
studied tend to be those that are least representative of intra-organizational conflict
regulation: spectacular cases of disintegration, where conflict escalates and is displayed in
public – be it by leading figures, rank-and-file or both - regardless of the damage done to the
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party’s image or functioning.1 Similarly, if existing work deals with intra-party conflict and its
regulation, it does so in association with specific events (e.g. organisational reform), in
particular, arenas (e.g. as triggered by coalition dynamics and government participation) or
in specific types of parties (e.g. heavily factionalized parties). In contrast, party tribunals deal
on a day-to-day basis with the full range of conflict types emerging in party organisations
(e.g. procedural violations, infringement on member rights, application of sanctions against
members and elites). In addition, despite the specific legal and organizational setting of
intra-organizational tribunals, its study is insightful for understanding conflict regulation
generally as they can be initiated and thus used both by the party leadership (e.g. to
discipline party members or sub-units perceived as doing damage to the party) and by
ordinary rank-and-file members (e.g. to challenge leadership decisions that fall outside the
remit of the latter’s authority). Hence unlike other hierarchical mechanisms of conflict
regulation that allow for the imposition of solutions on actors against their preferences, they
are not a mechanism of either top down or bottom up control that procedurally privileges
one group of internal actors over the other. Consequently, the framework presented below
on factors that determine when cases are approved by the tribunals and when they are
rejected can generate broader insights into patterns of conflict regulation, processes that
otherwise are widely hidden. Thus, our findings provide a broader picture on party conflict
regulation than earlier studies.
Finally, our research has important normative repercussions, as initially the study of
democracy has been focused on elections and only later fully considered its important legal
underpinnings. Similarly, the study of intra-party democracy has so far been dominated by
an interest in ‘electoral mechanisms' (e.g. primaries) at the expense of its legal foundations,
which is why intra-organizational mechanisms established by parties to protect their
members' rights remain widely understudied (but see Smith and Gauja 2010; Biezen and
Piccio 2013; Rahat 2013; Bolleyer et al 2015). The study of such mechanisms gives important
answers to whether the emulation of legal standards is likely to be possible in intra-
organizational settings.
1Prominent examples are the Dutch List Pim Fortuyn (Reuter 2009; de Lange and Art 2011), New Democracy in
Sweden (Aylott 1995; Bale and Blomgren 2008; Jungar 2013), the Spanish UCD (Gunther and Hopkin 2002) or the Italian Christian Democrats (Bardi 1996; Boucek 2012 and 2009).
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The paper proceeds as follows. It first discusses the legal literature on the politicisation of
judicial decision-making, which further justifies the focus on the acceptance stage in this
paper. The paper then develops the theoretical rationale for party goals based on policy,
office, votes. It proposes a political account of tribunal decision-making focusing on the
acceptance stage of a case based on the three party goals of policy, office and vote identified
by Müller and Strøm (1999). Overall we propose six hypotheses with two derived from each
party goal respectively. The second part using a mixed effects probit model empirically tests
the hypotheses using a unique data set of 1088 tribunal decisions, covering all national
verdicts made in the course of six German parties’ life cycle since the introduction of
compulsory party tribunals by the party law in 1967, the CDU, CSU, FDP, SPD, Greens (1980-
2016) and the Left (2007-2016). The results suggest that dynamics derived from parties’
aspiration to exercise policy influence, gain office access and maximize votes significantly
affect whether cases are likely to be accepted by the tribunal. Judges operating in parties
that are programmatically highly coherent (policy) are less likely to accept cases; if a party
lost government (weakening the ability of the party to downplay conflict), judges are more
permissive in the approval of cases. Vote considerations are relevant in that the greater the
gains parties made at the last election (strengthening its position), and hence the stronger
the position of the party towards internal challenges, the less likely cases are to be accepted,
while vote losses have the opposite effect. These findings hold despite controlling for
variables such as case type (new case or appeal), the type of the initiator who brings a case
to the tribunal (rank-and-file or elite), and membership size. Simultaneously, we find that
none of the three party goals exerts a significant effect on winning cases. This suggests that
the influence of political variables seem less pronounced in the decision stage than the
acceptance stage – which echoes expectations of a less politicised decision stage highlighted
in the judicial literature (Richards and Kritzer 2002, Kastellec and Lax 2008). Thus,
interestingly it seems that the influence of political variables is stronger in the acceptance
stage, which is supposed to be a neutral process to reject cases based on formal grounds,
compared to the more public and therefore transparent decision stage. The paper concludes
with the broader repercussions of the findings and avenues for future research. Overall our
findings call for further investigation into the acceptance stage of tribunals both in the
literature on intra-party conflict but also the judicial literature more generally.
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1. Politicisation of Judicial Decision-Making
Starting out from the literature on judicial decision-making in state courts, politicisation of
court decision-making is defined as present if court rulings are not – or not exclusively –
based on legal criteria (Hein and Ewert 2016). Politicization thus refers to the instances in
which judges either are consciously or unconsciously influenced in their decision making “by
their political preferences or considerations regarding political appropriateness, or even
decide a case on the basis of political criteria and then prepare a legal reasoning to support
this” (Hein and Ewert 2014). There is a growing literature both in political science (Stone
Sweet 2000) and legal studies (see Hein and Ewert 2016 for an overview) on the role of
politicisation with regard to various aspects such as appointment of judges or judicial review.
Studies on the politicisation of the case selection process in courts are very limited and often
only focus on supreme courts (Kastellec and Lax 2008). Kastellec and Lax (2008) point out
that supreme court judges only have to take cases they deem of public importance or
concern an important legal issue, which gives them wide leeway to decide which “cases are
worthy of their time and attention “(Yates and Coggins: 286). Indeed in 2013 the Supreme
Court of the United States accepted only about 1% of the applications, the Supreme Court of
Canada admitted 10% and the Supreme Court of the UK admitted 35% (Mak 2015). On what
basis then do judges pick and choose their cases?
Hein and Ewert (2016) argue that court decisions generally are (co-)determined by political
influences such as the judges' political party affiliations, policy preferences, ethical or
religious beliefs and socio-cultural backgrounds. More specifically, scholars of the US
Supreme Court argue that judge’s partisan and policy preferences play a role in accepting
cases, stressing the role of ideology (Yates and Coggins 2009; Zorn and Bowie 2010).
Similarly, Joondeph (2008) highlights the impact of electoral politics when considering the
role of politics in judicial decision-making. Sheldon (1970) even conceptualises judges as
'politicians in robes' and argues that they do not systematically differ from other political
actors. Thus, for example, they can select cases in order to develop particular legal doctrines
(Kastellec and Lax 2008). Segal and Spath (2002: 240-41) further stress that while there are
certain instances where judges are less likely to refuse cases “for all practical purposes, the
justices are free to accept or reject cases brought to their attention as they see fit” and thus
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significant case sorting is performed by judges before there is even a hearing on them. Thus
such ideological and policy influence on case acceptance is in clear opposition to the purely
formal and procedural grounds on which case acceptance or rejection should be based
(Provine 1980: 15). Overall, this points to a clearly politicised acceptances stage of courts at
the state level.
What are the implications of this for the operation of intra-party tribunals? Given that
parties indeed often claim to emulate not only the norms but also procedures of courts on
the state level in their conflict resolution mechanisms, one might expect that judges’
decisions to accept or reject cases in intra-party tribunals are also affected by a political
rather than a purely legal calculus. They further might be affected by organisational
considerations as judges within parties have a vested interest in the success and survival of
their organisation. However, while the option to reject cases also exists for intra-party
tribunals, paradoxically, some party statutes (imposed by party law or voluntarily chosen)
restrict tribunals’ judges much more in this stage compared to judges at the state level, as
laid out in more detail later in the German case. This is the case even though intra-party
politics is perceived as naturally politicized by definition. In this light of this tension, this
study aims to see whether in the case of party tribunals Joondeph’s (2008: 348) observation
that the “determinants of judicial decisions, law and politics are in many respects
inextricably intertwined” also hold in intra-party settings.
2. A Political Account of Tribunal Decision-Making: The Importance of Policy, Office and
Votes
We propose a new framework on tribunal decision-making based on the three main party
goals of office, vote and policy identified Müller and Strøm (1999). The underlying rationale
is that through strategically selecting or rejecting cases judges can contribute to or reduce
threats to the fulfilment of these goals and, more fundamentally, contribute to
organisational stability. Müller and Strøm (1999) differentiate between three central goals
that parties tend to pursue simultaneously – policy, office and vote maximisation. Each goal
imposes its own constraints on a party and is likely to feedback into internal matters,
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including tribunal decision-making. As Müller and Strøm (1999: 9) point out parties might
not be able to realise all three goals simultaneously, and behaviour designed to achieve one
might not lead to the best possible outcome with respect to the others. For example, the
possibility to enter office might come with giving up certain policies, or, conversely,
promoting certain policies might either cost the party votes and offices. In short most times
there is a trade-off between the three goals and parties must decide which goal to prioritise.
Our framework allows us to capture how considerations related to these three goals might
affect the acceptance of cases by judges. Further Müller and Strøm (1999) stress that
elections happen only at intervals and thus parties long term electoral pursuits might
conflict with more immediate policy or office gratification. Lastly, change in external or
competitive environment will affect party goals, its priorities and the behaviour of parties.
By assuming that parties have multiple potentially conflicting goals allows us to disaggregate
them analytically to explain party behaviour and political pressure on judges in accepting
cases in more detail. Thus a 'balanced approach' considering all three goals of office, policy,
votes is most suitable to study the influence of political consideration on the judges’
propensity to accept or reject cases as this provides a full picture of judges non-legal
considerations during different stages and points. The exact connection between parties’
attempt to achieve each goal and judges’ propensity to accept or reject cases (i.e. deal or
ignore with conflict) is specified in the following.
Policy: Ideological Unity and Responsiveness to Intra-Organizational Conflict One of the main goals of parties is to maximise its impact on public policy (Müller and Strøm
1999: 7). But in order to do so effectively they need to present a coherent set of policies as
parties that appear divided over policies tend to lose elections (Greene 2014) and are less
likely to get into government (Bäck 2008). Lack of clear policy programme is often due to
ideological disunity in the party leading to divers or even opposing views regarding all party
aspects. This affects not only the intra-organizational decision-making processes but more
importantly here the shape of intra-party conflict regulation. Parties need to find a way to
internally absorb conflict resulting from ideological disunity before it becomes problematic
and damages their policy, vote and office seeking capabilities. Here party tribunals' play a
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crucial role. Up to a certain level tribunals can and actually prefer to ignore conflict as this
makes it less visible to the outside and might reduce it internally. However the less unified
the party is, the harder this becomes and the more tribunals become the main party
structures channelling dissent and containing conflict within the organisation and thus
limiting its external visibility. Thus while tribunals do not directly decide over ideological
conflicts their workload is reflected by it. The less ideologically unified a party the less willing
its members will be to accept internal decisions that are seen as controversial and
consequently become more willing to use a formal procedure in form the party tribunal to
challenge such decisions. Therefore the less united a party, the more it is pressed to
accommodate a variety of views, meaning judges are less in the position to refuse dealing
with cases as it otherwise might have negative external consequences of the party.
Conversely, we can expect judges operating in parties with high unity to be more able to
ignore conflict, in turn leading to lower acceptance rates and more restrictiveness in the
acceptance stage. This leads us to our first hypothesis:
H1.1 (Ideological Unity Hypothesis): Judges in ideologically united parties are less likely to
accept cases than judges in ideologically divided parties.
In addition to ideological divisions within the party, another factor that might affect the use
of tribunals is the membership and parties’ general attitude towards law, order and
obedience. Based on previous findings members of left parties are expected to be more
ready to challenge decisions and policy positions of the party elite compared to members of
more right-wing parties (Sandri and von Nostitz 2015). Further members also put more
emphasis on intra-party democracy and thus are more ready to highlight when procedures
were not conducted in a proper way. Given this, we expect judges in left parties to feel
more obligated and/or willing to accept cases, leading to our second hypothesis.
H1.2 (Ideological Position): The more conservative the party is the less likely judges are to accept a case. Office: Conflict Resolution Inside and Outside Government The second goal of parties identified by Müller and Strøm (1999: 5) is office. The successful
holding of government office has important intra-organizational repercussions. While a
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government party is busy implementing its program, its attention shifts from organisational
matters to the functioning of the party in public office (Katz and Mair 1995). Simultaneously,
government participation often brings its share of frustration to those in the organization
not involved in governing themselves, in terms of the compromises necessary in the making
of policy – especially in coalition governments – and the quite common decline in direct
accountability of those running government to the organization outside of the institutions
(e.g. Müller-Rommel and Poguntke 2002). This can fuel internal conflict and enhance the
need for conflict resolution in a period during which the public display of such conflict might
be particularly unwelcome. At the same time while in the government a party might be
more able to downplay or ignore internal conflict as there is more at stake in terms of the
reputation and image that might affect the party’s ability to effectively implement its
programme. Here judges can play a crucial role in supporting this effort by accepting fewer
cases.
H2.1 (Government Party Hypothesis): Judges are less likely to accept cases when their party is in government than when it is in opposition. As being in government might set incentives to downplay conflict, losing government is
usually triggering enhanced internal debate around explaining the party’s failure to stay in
office and the finding of measures to remedy whatever deficiencies were identified.
Research has shown that in these opposition periods parties’ lines of authority are
weakened (Courtney 1995: 262) and intra-organizational challenges and reforms become
particularly likely. For parties it is a chance for renewal (LeDuc 2001) and a possibility for the
organization to reconnect with members and voters. These periods often include reforms
that empower the members over party elites, which the latter might not have agreed to had
they not been in a position of weakness (i.e. had they not lost office) (Cross and Blais 2012).
Regarding conflict regulation, this suggests that government loss should make the process of
conflict resolution more permissive and improve the chances for a case to be accepted.
Consequently, judges might be more willing to accept cases because the party’s move to
opposition weakens their ability to downplay conflict in the name of protecting the party in
government and, at the same time, there is less at stake by displaying conflict when in
opposition.
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H2.2 (Government Loss Hypothesis): Judges are more likely to accept a case after their party has lost government
Vote Maximisation and the Bypassing of Conflict
The third goal that motivates parties’ behaviour is vote maximisation with the aim to receive
more votes than the other parties and thus win elections (Müller and Strøm 1999: 8).
Achieving this goal is also vital to achieving the other two goals of office and policy.
Therefore parties are most likely to reform both in terms of policy, personnel and
organisation if they underperformed in the latest election in terms of votes. In fact, Janda
(1990: 5) describes electoral defeat as the ‘‘mother of party change’’. Besides forcing parties
to re-evaluate their ideological position, electoral defeat also frequently involves reassessing
internal structures and processes (Harmel and Janda, 1994). Due to the political pressures
resulting from electoral underperformance, we can expect the new situation to also affect
how tribunals deal with cases submitted to them. These periods often involve debates
around how internal processes work, how decisions are made and intense internal
arguments over mistakes made to explain vote loss. It becomes difficult for the weakened
party to downplay or ignore conflict and as the readiness to give in to demands of intra-
organizational reform increases; the organisation might also be more permissive in the
explicit and more public handling of the conflict in the context of intra-party tribunals. This
suggests that after a loss of seats during elections, more cases should make it through the
approval stage of the tribunals.
H3.1 (Vote Gain Hypothesis): Judges are less likely to accept cases the more a party’s electoral performance improves.
Theorizing the repercussions of parties’ vote aspirations, the timing of when intra-party
conflict is handled is important. Clarke (2013) distinguishes between conflict occurring over
the entire inter-electoral period and conflict that occurs in the months immediately prior to
election day. With regard to the latter, he further argues that the closer parties get to the
next election the more likely they are to draw the media’s spotlight and thus want to
present themselves as unified. Furthermore, conflict closer to election day will be recalled
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by voters when going to the polls, and thus might have a negative impact on the party’s
electoral prospects (Clark 2013). This is echoed by Traber et al (2013: 194) stating that
“elections are likely to play an important role in the quest for party unity”. Therefore, party
unity is intrinsic and essential in achieving the vote maximisation goal in itself but is also key
to realising office and policy goals (Müller and Strøm 1999, Andeweg et al 2011). Close to
elections, tribunal judges might therefore be incentivized to accept fewer cases.
Consequently, following Skjaeveland’s (1999), Lindstadt et al.’s (2011) and Traber et al
(2013) lead we assess whether in the running up to elections parties aim to present
themselves as more unified, leading to our final hypothesis:
H3.2 (Days Until Election) The closer a case is to the next election day the less likely judges
are to accept the case.
3. Case Selection: Germany as Least Likely Setting for ‘Tribunal Politicization’
Applying conceptions of rule of law to intra-organizational settings (Agrast et al 2010), party
tribunals can be seen as formally independent and can be considered as equivalent to ‘state
courts’ if neither members of the party in public office nor central office (the two groups
that constitute the party leadership) are allowed to take a formal role in them. Such
structures can be chosen by parties voluntarily or, alternatively, be imposed by party
legislation. Indeed, the German party law introduced in 1967 requires parties to assure their
members’ right to dissent and prescribes in great detail the type of tribunals to be
established (Biezen and Piccio 2013). The law prescribes three areas that affect intra-
organizational conflict regulation: ‘rights of members’, ‘party tribunals’ and ‘measures
against regional party units’ (De Petris 2000: 54). Specifically, it requires tribunals to be
independent, thus sitting on a tribunal is incompatible with membership in the party
executive (Biezen and Piccio 2013: 39-40). Reflecting this legal environment, the statutes of
German parties – CDU, CSU, Left, Greens, SPD and FDP – have established tribunals whose
independence is ensured by a number of intra-organizational rules2: incompatibility of
2Die Linke: http://www.die-linke.de/fileadmin/download/dokumente/ordnungen_mai2014/ordnungen_der_partei_die_linke__stand_mai2014.pdf(p. 5-11) The Greens: https://www.gruene.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Dokumente/Satzung/150425_-_Satzung_Bundesverband.pdf (p.75-82)
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tribunal membership with any party office (§14 Abs 2)3, members of tribunals have to be
(re)elected at least every two or four years by the party congress, all participants in a case -
judge, plaintiff or defendant - can apply to request the replacement of a judge given
suspicion of bias (§14 Abs 4) and judges are obliged to report any conflict of interest they
might encounter in a case and have to excuse themselves from the trial. By trying to
replicate court structures on the state level, these provisions should assure a neutral and
efficient decision-making process unaffected by political influences, strategic considerations
or other sources of bias unrelated to the nature of the case.4 Independence and thus
absence of bias suggest that cases should be judged exclusively based on their own merit, in
the acceptance stage based on whether cases meet all formal criteria to be heard or not,
and in the decision stage based on the quality of the evidence brought forward to prove or
disprove the violation of party rules posited by a submission. This makes the German case a
‘least likely case’ for finding support for our hypotheses that expects parties’ strategic
attempts of goal attainment and reconciliation to feed into tribunal decision-making. If we
find politicised judicial decision-making here it is highly likely to play an even stronger role in
less regulated intra-party dispute mechanisms and thus challenges the existence intra-party
democracies.
This strict legal environment is particularly relevant in the acceptance stage. Across all
parties covered here the party statutes clearly outline and limit the possibilities for judges to
reject a case without opening a hearing. It is possible to identify three main justifications
judges can use and all three are narrowly circumscribed: formal mistakes, cases outside
tribunal's jurisdiction, and cases without merit. The first justification is to reject a case based
on formal mistakes such as missing official deadlines or providing incomplete claims. In
addition, there are formal deadlines such as the limited time to file appeals after the verdict
SPD: https://www3.spd.de/linkableblob/1852/data/ CDU: https://www.cdu.de/system/tdf/media/statutenbroschuere.pdf?file=1 CSU: http://www.csu.de/common/csu/content/csu/hauptnavigation/partei/satzung/CSU-Satzung-Nov2015-ES.pdf FDP: https://www.fdp.de/sites/default/files/uploads/2016/01/26/schiedsgerichtsordnung2013.pdf 3This also includes public office, central office and any employee of the party or any of its organs. Further they
must not receive a salary from the party in any form 4 Thus a “party tribunal” for conflict resolution that is chaired by the party leader or run by members of the executive would not qualify as the equivalent of a “court” since it lacks formal independence from those who hold core powers in the party. Such structures would qualify as hierarchical and leadership controlled instead (see Bolleyer et al. 2016).
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or ability to challenge internal election results. However such rejection should be rare as all
the rules and statutes of the tribunal are publically available and include the details the
formal requirements. The second justification for a formal rejection is that the plaintiff’s
claim lies outside the tribunal’s jurisdiction or the plaintiff did not follow the correct legal
path through the lower tribunal. However, this does not necessarily mean there is no merit
in the claim it was just submitted to wrong tribunal at the wrong time. Again rejection based
on these two justifications should be limited as for all parties covered here the tribunal’s
areas of responsibilities are clearly defined in party statutes and that in most instances
plaintiffs first have to approach lower tribunals. The last rejection is that judges perceive the
plaintiffs claim to be without merit. Here judges see no legal base for plaintiffs’ complaints in
the party statutes or the plaintiffs fail to include or clearly justify the legal basis for the
complaint. Thus whether or not a case is accepted depends on the presiding judge’s
interpretation of the law and as such might be affected consciously or not by non-legal
factors such as party goals and other political considerations.
In summary, the party tribunal can refuse to take on cases that are incomplete, inadmissible
(outside the tribunal's jurisdiction) or without merit. However, overall judges should have
very little leeway to reject cases. Importantly, whatever the reason for non-acceptance, the
initiator, usually within a certain time period, can challenge the tribunal’s decision and
request the opening of tribunal hearing, leading to a reassessment. This further reduces the
likelihood of judges rejecting cases easily.
Covering all parties constituting the German party system over an extensive time period has
several methodological advantages regarding our ability to test our hypotheses due to the
composition of the resulting sample of tribunal decisions and the contextual conditions in
which these decisions were made (Slater and Ziblatt 2013: 1311-13). The German Party Law
was adopted in 1967. Neither the party law nor the parties’ statutes implementing it have
made significant changes in the regulation of party tribunals. Thus, core procedural
requirements regarding tribunals’ composition and operation were constant for all tribunal
decisions made across the parties, factors that might have affected tribunal decision-making
otherwise. As our parties cover a wide spectrum of intra-organizational decision-making
cultures, we therefore also cover a wide a variety of tribunal submissions as well as tribunal
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outcomes. This, in turn, should enhance our sample’s representativeness regarding the
types of conflicts parties have to deal with generally as well as of the diverse ways of
responding to such conflicts. Finally, tribunal documentation is available for an ideologically
diverse set of parties up to a 48-year period (1967– end of 2015). During this period parties
joined and left national government, experienced electoral victories and defeats and
repeatedly revised their party programs, allowing us to test the influence of the core
variables in our theoretical framework across parties and over time.
4. Data, Coding and Measurement
Our analysis covers all cases of parliamentary parties' national tribunals decided since the
introduction of the 1967 German Party Law until 2015. Tribunal documentation about cases
in the Greens, CDU, CSU, SPD and FDP was compiled by the Institut für Deutsches und
Internationales Parteienrecht und Parteienforschung (PRuF) at the University of Dusseldorf.5
Tribunal documentation for the Left Party was taken from the Left Party’s own website.6 To
test our hypotheses, we created a new dataset based on the tribunal documentation just
described which captured a range of additional case characteristics (see dependent and
control variable section). Thanks to the high level of formalisation of these party procedures
and the clear documentation of each tribunal case, coding decisions, guided by a codebook
capturing all the core variables, were straightforward and unambiguous.7
Dependent Variables. The coding of whether a case was approved or not (i.e. admitted to
the tribunal in the first place), was straightforward as the rejection of a case has to be
justified in writing to the initiator indicating which procedural requirement it violated to
5Institut für Deutsches und Internationales Parteienrecht und Parteienforschung Schiedsgerichtsurteile der
obersten Parteischiedsgerichte (PRuF) http://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/search/search-judgment.xml 6Die Link. Beschlüsse der Bundesschiedskommission http://www.die-linke.de/partei/weitere-
strukturen/gewaehlte-gremien/schiedskommission/beschluesse-der-bundesschiedskommission/ 7In all three parties, in order to start a tribunal case the initiator must provide the following information in
written form: (1) Name, address and further contact details of initiator, (2) Name and address of the defendant, (3) Clear, unambiguous claim and (4) Reasons for the initiative including a description of the events based on which accusations are made. Once the tribunal receives the claim it reviews the case and either accept, it leading to a hearing, or rejects the case based on lack of merit or failure to comply with all formal requirements. In case of rejection, the jury is required to send all participants a written justification for it. It has to include the following information: the evidence provided related to the case and a justification of the tribunal decision with reference to the same evidence. Further, it needs to stress that plaintiff can appeal the initial rejection if they wish to do so.
16
prevent its consideration by the tribunal. This was coded based on the section of the trial
documentation presenting the tribunal decision (always starting with the words “the
tribunal decided…”). In a case of reject, this section identifies the reason for it as either
based on being incomplete (formal error), inadmissible (outside the tribunal’s jurisdiction)
or without legal merit. We further coded, once a case was accepted if the initiator won the
case or not. Again this was straightforward and was coded based on the same element of
the written tribunal decision as above.
Explanatory Variables. To measure Ideological Unity (H1.1) we use Giebler et al’s measure of
programmatic clarity (2015) which captures how clear party policy positions are within
parties’ election manifestos based on Comparative Party Manifesto (CMP) data (Volkens et al
2016). Measured for each election on a continuous scale between zero (inconsistent party
policy) and one (fully consistent), we assign the value from the latest available election to
each case. Maximum policy clarity and therefore ideological unity is given when a party
presents only positive or negative statements in a certain policy area and no policies in the
opposite direction. In contrast, if a party presents both positive and negative statements in
a policy area, policy clarity and therefore ideological unity decreases. To further assess policy
dynamics, we code the Ideology (Open-Closed) variable. It also derives from the CMP data
and scores each party on its ideological position on a continuum ranging from very open
progressive positions (negative values) towards more closed and conservative worldviews
(positive values). Doing so, it reflects the well-known GAL-TAN dimension introduced by the
Chapel Hill Expert Survey (Bakker et al 2015) capturing parties’ position on the liberation/
post-materialist to traditional/authoritarian ideological spectrum.
To capture the governmental dynamics of our office logic we use two dummies: First, our
Government Status (H2.1) variable distinguishes cases in government parties (1) from those
in opposition parties (0). Second, our Government Loss (H2.2) variable codes the first year
after a party loses governmental power as (1) and the remaining years as (0).
To assess the validity of our vote hypotheses, we calculate the Vote Loss variable on the basis
of the ParlGov database (Döring and Manow 2016) by taking the absolute difference in vote
shares in the past two elections. For example, if a party gains 20% in 2013 and 25% in 2010
we would code a 5% vote loss for all cases after the 2013 election. When parties gain votes,
17
we code a zero. Finally, we construct Days to Election variable that counts the days until the
next election. It reaches (0) on the day of the election and is reset at the time until the next
election approaches on the day after the election.
Control Variables. To control for alternative explanations that might affect acceptance we
add several variables to all specifications. Our first control variable assesses whether the
case brought forward was an appeal or not. Most initiators likely appeal after the party
tribunals rejected their original cases due to technical inadequacies, and we thus expect a
higher acceptance rate of appeals. Second, our Subject variable controls whether the case
covers organisational challenges (1) or membership expulsion (0). As the latter can be
essential to sustain the organisation's integrity and are less costly for the organisation to
implement we expect that organisational challenges are more often rejected by tribunals
(Cross and Katz 2013: 181). Third, we control for the role of the initiator within the party.
Classical works predict an ‘iron law of oligarchy' (Michels 1962: 64, 70; Duverger 1964) that
would seem to suggest that cases brought forward by party elites, that is public and party
office-holders, should be more likely to get through the acceptance stage than cases
initiated by rank and file members. Fourth, party age, measured in years, distinguishes
between more institutionalised parties and younger ones with a high influx of new
members. More institutionalised parties can afford to accept more cases as they pose lower
threats to party survival. Finally, we control for membership size. Larger parties feature more
members and more diverse opinions. They may thus be more selective in which cases they
accept than their smaller counterparts. We derive membership figures from the MAPP
project database (Spier 2014). We log both party age and membership size as the Social
Democrats prove to be an outlier on both measures.
4.1 Overview of Tribunal Cases
Table 1 gives an overview of cases submitted by party since 1967 (introduction of party law)
or since their formation, in the case of new parties. More particularly, it shows how many
made it to the decision stage.
18
Table 1: Tribunal Decisions in German Parties
Party Name
Period covered
No. of Approval Stage Cases
No. of Decision Stage Cases
Share of Decision Stage Cases
CDU 1967-2015 329 245 0.744681
CSU 1967-2015 102 72 0.705882
FDP 1967-2015 98 88 0.897959
Greens 1980-2015 92 76 0.826087
Left 2007-2015 114 75 0.657895
SPD 1967-2015 353 240 0.679887
Total 1967-2015 1088 796
Figure 1 displays the acceptance rate over ten five-year periods by party. It becomes
immediately apparent that our data do not only contain differences between parties but
vary substantially over time. No consistent trend across parties emerges. Newly founded
parties such as the Greens and the Left see a considerable increase in the number of cases
accepted by their tribunals in the second period after they enter our sample. Yet we see a
similar uptick in the Social Democrats’ accepted cases in their second period. Clearly, the
Social Democrats were not ‘new kids on the block’ in the second half of the 1970s.
Moreover, the increase in accepted cases for the Greens is far less steep than the increase
for Social Democrats and the Left. In contrast, the CDU, the CSU, and the FDP experience far
milder changes in the number of accepted cases.
19
Figure 1: Number of Approved Cases by Party over Time
5. Findings
5.1 Model Choice
We estimate the likelihood of acceptance by using a mixed effects probit model with
random intercepts for each party. As Figure 1 revealed substantial differences between
parties, the random intercepts help us capture residual variance not picked up by our
controls.8 We opt for a probit over a logit specification to facilitate comparisons with
Heckman selection (probit) models that integrate the acceptance and outcome stages of
tribunal cases. To preview our results, we find strong support for a systematic operation of
the political logic in the acceptance but not in the outcome stage of party tribunal cases in
line with our theoretical expectations. While this might suggest a possible selection effect
for the outcome stage, we find no evidence for such an effect when running Heckman
selection models.9
8 We also tried party fixed effects models without substantial difference. 9 The Heckman models confirm the results estimated in independent acceptance and outcome models. The results are available upon request
20
5. 2 Findings
Table 2 provides the results of our analyses on which factors shape the likelihood of
tribunals accepting or rejecting cases. While Model 1 only shows the control variables (base
model), Models 2-4 reflect variables associated with each of our three hypotheses that
capture our policy, office and votes arguments. Model 5 combines all hypothesis tests into
one model.
In Models 2-4, we find strong support for our theoretical arguments. Lack of ideological
unity decreases the likelihood of acceptance as outlined in H1. In line with H2.1 parties in
government are associated with a greater acceptance of cases relative to long-time
opposition parties, and so are parties that recently lost governmental power (H2.2). Finally,
successful elections result in lower acceptance of cases as predicted by H3. In sum, tested
separately each of our main arguments is supported by the data. This is a striking result
given that the leeway for judges to reject cases for reasons other than procedural violations
should not exist.
Turning to our integrated Model 5, we continue to find support for our theoretical rationale
but confidence H3.2 decreases. Both ideological unity and a recent loss of government
power continue to be statistically significant at conventional levels. Our vote gain variable
drops to the .1% level and government party status fails to reach statistical significance
entirely, if barely so. The high correlation between gaining votes and ruling the country
partially accounts for this increased uncertainty. Nevertheless, there seems to be an
independent effect of recent electoral success even for parties that do not make it into
government.
21
Table 2: Determinants of Case Acceptance by German Party Tribunals
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
DV: Case accepted
Ideological Unity
-1.159+ (0.615)
-1.151+ (0.615)
Ideology (Open-Closed)
0.00806* (0.00360)
0.00950* (0.00382)
Government Party
0.0878 (0.101)
0.0462 (0.109)
Government Loss
(last year)
1.139* (0.444)
0.925* (0.439)
Vote Loss
0.0586* (0.0242)
0.0811* (0.0256)
Days Until Election
0.000208* (0.000105)
0.000190+ (0.000106)
Appeal 0.512* (0.112)
0.506* (0.109)
0.499* (0.112)
0.481* (0.112)
0.439* (0.111)
Subject Matter -0.278* (0.0967)
-0.268* (0.0952)
-0.282* (0.0970)
-0.273* (0.0973)
-0.285* (0.0963)
Initiator 0.111 (0.0966)
0.107 (0.0947)
0.109 (0.0970)
0.118 (0.0975)
0.131 (0.0962)
Party Age (log) 0.214* (0.0804)
0.0751 (0.0712)
0.174* (0.0811)
0.146+ (0.0810)
-0.00326 (0.0773)
Membership Size (log) -0.327* (0.0750)
-0.297* (0.0708)
-0.310* (0.0722)
-0.309* (0.0733)
-0.284* (0.0719)
Constant 3.732* (0.773)
4.914* (0.708)
3.617* (0.741)
3.553* (0.755)
4.805* (0.711)
Party-Random Effect 0.0123 (0.0124)
1.31e-30 (7.48e-16)
0.00917 (0.0108)
0.0107 (0.0120)
7.74e-31 (1.56e-16)
Observations 1047 1044 1047 1044 1044
Standard errors in parentheses
+ p < 0.10, * p < 0.05
The estimates of our controls reveal mixed results. In line with existing expectations, appeals
are more likely to make it through the approval stage, as are cases of membership expulsion.
In contrast, judges of larger parties consistently seem to accept cases at a lower frequency
than judges of smaller parties. Although party elites have a slightly higher likelihood of
22
seeing their cases accepted we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no difference between
elites and normal party members. The effect of party age is inconsistent. In two out of five
specifications, the estimate of party age is positively and statistically significantly related to
higher rates of acceptance. Yet it even turns negative in our complete model.
Substantively, ideological unity exerts by far the largest effect on the likelihood of
acceptance (future versions will contain predicted probabilities). The only variable that
comes close to the estimated effect of ideological unity is logged membership size. All other
variables reach at most half the substantive impact of the factor associated with our first
hypothesis. After accounting for these controls, little variation remains between parties. The
random intercepts for each party only explain a minute part of the overall variance.
In essence, our findings so far suggest that strategic considerations related to parties’
attempts to achieve central goals –policy, office, and votes - affect whether judges are likely
to deal with instances of conflict and decide on them or avoid making decisions on them
altogether, thereby bypassing conflict within the organization due to political considerations.
Indeed, hypotheses related to the pursuit of all three party goals showed significant effects
in the theoretically expected direction.
Yet do we find political variables also to play a role in the decision stage determining
whether initiators win or lose their cases or do they mainly affect the tendencies of judges
to ignore conflict? Table 3 presents the findings for the same variables in the decision stage
and how they affect the ruling of judges either in favour or against the plaintiffs claim. We
find that an approved appeal plays a role but we find the opposite sign, with appeals more
likely to be accepted but less likely to be won. In contrast to the acceptance stage, whether
or not the initiator is a party official seems to affect the outcome of cases. Cases initiated by
party office-holders are indeed more likely to be won. Overall, however, the findings
displayed suggest that the core political variables as theorised in our framework to play less
of a role in the decision compared to the acceptance stage. This again highlights the need to
study the acceptance stage of party tribunals and courts more generally as we otherwise
might overlook non-legal factors that influences judicial decision-making.
23
Table 3: Determinants of Case Decisions by German Party Tribunals
(6) (7) (8) (9) (10)
DV: Case won
Ideological Unity
-0.492 (0.529)
-0.582 (0.473)
Ideology (Open-Closed)
-0.00561 (0.00399)
-0.00349 (0.00345)
Government Party
-0.240* (0.110)
-0.130 (0.114)
Government Loss
-0.161 (0.245)
-0.164 (0.247)
Vote Loss
0.0478* (0.0217)
0.0445* (0.0226)
Time Until Election
-0.000139 (0.000112)
-0.000117 (0.000114)
Appeal -0.409* (0.157)
-0.377* (0.179)
-0.436* (0.156)
-0.413* (0.169)
-0.336* (0.129)
Subject Matter -0.0440 (0.0994)
-0.0496 (0.0994)
-0.0429 (0.100)
-0.0518 (0.0995)
-0.0535 (0.0990)
Initiator 0.379* (0.102)
0.384* (0.101)
0.369* (0.102)
0.383* (0.102)
0.381* (0.0989)
Party Age (log) -0.0875 (0.130)
-0.00732 (0.132)
-0.0617 (0.154)
-0.0737 (0.124)
0.0364 (0.0652)
Constant 0.316 (0.500)
0.326 (0.693)
0.359 (0.577)
0.315 (0.495)
0.362 (0.478)
Party-Random Effect 0.0374 (0.0551)
0.0158 (0.0410)
0.0552 (0.0757)
0.0221 (0.0461)
5.67e-29 (3.50e-15)
Observations 771 771 771 771 771
Standard errors in parentheses + p < 0.10, * p < 0.05 Conclusions
This paper set out to explore if in an intra-organisational setting judges’ decisions to
accept or reject cases are influenced by the political dynamics of parties’ policy, office, and
vote goals. To do so the paper first discusses the judicial literature on the politicisation of
24
judicial decision-making. This further highlighted the need to focus on the acceptance stage
in the judicial decision making process. It then developed a new theoretical framework to
explore the influence of parties’ policy, office and vote goals on a judge's propensity to
accept or reject a case. In total, we proposed six hypotheses. The empirical analysis
confirmed most of the expectations when we tested our hypotheses separately: lack of
ideological unity decreases the likelihood of acceptance (H1.1), parties in government are
associated with a greater acceptance of cases (H2.1) and so are parties that recently lost
governmental power (H2.2). Finally, successful elections result in lower acceptance of cases
as predicted by H3.1. In our integrated Model 5, we continued to find support for our
theoretical rationale but confidence in H2.1 and H3.2 decreased. Both ideological unity and
a recent loss of government power continued to be statistically significant at conventional
levels. In essence, our findings so far suggest that strategic considerations related to parties’
attempts to achieve central goals –policy, office, and votes - affect whether judges accept
cases or not. This is a striking result given that the leeway for judges to reject cases for
reasons other than procedural violations should not exist.
In conclusion, despite the high legalisation of intra-party conflict resolution in
Germany political parties, political influences as theorised by our framework still matter for
decisions made by tribunals. Furthermore, these influences operate more visibly in the
acceptance stage, indicating that political pressures and parties' strategic considerations
seem to be more relevant for whether to deal with a conflict at all than in whose favour
judges decide. More broadly speaking this stresses the importance, for both political science
but also judicial literature, of focusing more on the acceptance stage in a judge’s decision
making as we otherwise might overlook important political influences. Here it would be
interesting to explore the influence of these three party goals in further cases where the law
also require internal party tribunals such as for example in the Czech Republic, Romania and
Portugal (van Biezen and Piccio 2013). Beyond this, our findings partly challenge the political
neutrality of the tribunals and raise questions as to what extent it is possible to effectively
transplant court structures into an organisational setting.
25
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